role in the formulation of the 1941 budget and the post-war backlash against the organisation asa collector of ‘dreary trivia’.

As this book makes clear Mass-Observation was, and remains, a multi-faceted and complexorganisation simultaneously quantitative and qualitative in its attempt to represent everydaylife. Just as ‘Mass-Observation’ itself means many different things, so there is room for manydifferent histories of it which privilege different angles. In Mass-Observation and Everyday LifeNick Hubble has provided an important account of its intellectual development and makesa strong case for its role in helping to transform mid-century Britain.

Claire LanghamerUniversity of Sussex, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.10.012

224 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 207e236

DavidKaiser (Ed.),Pedagogy and thePractice of Science:Historical andContemporaryPerspectives,Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2005, vi þ 426 pages, US$45 hardback.

‘Pedagogy,’ editor David Kaiser asserts in his introduction to this volume, ‘is where the intellec-tual rubber meets the politico-cultural road’ (p. 2). Issues of education and training have certainlybecome key topics in the sociology and social history of science in recent years, and there are nownumerous case studies of the modes of cultural production and reproduction of the ideology ofscience and of scientific knowledge and practice in educational settings. Based on the proceedingsof two conferences in 2002, this engaging collection of essays adds another rich selection of em-pirical material and new veins of theoretical insight to the genre. Drawing on the history of thephysical sciences in Europe, Asia and America from the nineteenth century to the recent past,the volume also has broader implications for historians of other disciplines and of other timesand places.

The collection has a loose but cogent thematic organisation. In Part One, ‘Teaching Practices,Transferring Skills,’ the contributors offer case studies of the relationships between pedagogicalstrategies and research practices. Michael Gordin explores the origins of Beilstein’s well-knownHandbuch der Organische Chemie, situating its writing in the context of nationalist conflict be-tween the German and Russian chemical communities in the nineteenth century and emphasisingits role in standardising international chemical practice. David Kaiser’s own exemplary chapterfollows the dispersion of Feynman diagrams in American physics from the 1940s to the 1960sby a closely connected group of young theoretical physicists, and nicely emphasises the specific-ities of local contexts in the deployment and dissemination of what later became routine depic-tions of nature. Hugh Gusterson rounds off the section by charting the decline of the nuclearweapons complex since the end of the Cold War and the methods of computer simulation nowused to train weapons scientists for nuclear weapon stockpile stewardship e a routine processone of his interviewees likens to ‘polishing turds’ (p. 81).

Scholars in Science and Technology Studies have long been aware of the importance ofscientific controversies as strategic sites for the revelation of tacit knowledge and ideologicalconflict in science. Part Two of the volume accordingly explores ‘Pedagogical Cultures inCollision’ in an attempt to map the processes by which the appropriateness or otherwise ofparticular pedagogical cultures have been negotiated. Graeme Gooday’s well-wrought chapter

225Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 207e236

describes debates about the value of high mathematical theory in late nineteenth century elec-trical engineering. Kenji Ito considers the importance of the ‘Copenhagen spirit’ in the transmis-sion of quantum mechanics to Japan in the 1930s, while Cyrus Mody gives a fascinatingaccount of the development of electron tunnelling microscopy in the intensely competitive en-vironment of American corporate laboratories at IBM and Bell Labs and the very different con-text of west coast universities in the 1980s.

Part three is devoted to perhaps the most obvious and important instruments of pedagogy:textbooks. Antonio Garcı́a-Belmar and colleagues report on the results of their survey of 500French chemistry textbooks produced between 1789 and 1860, setting them in the contexts ofauthorship, publishers, readers and the changing educational infrastructure of revolutionaryand post-revolutionary France. Karl Hall nicely shows how the influential Course of TheoreticalPhysics by Soviet physicists Lev Landau and Evgenii Lifshitz reflected Soviet ideology and thesociology of the Soviet physics community in the mid-twentieth century. And Buhm Soon Parkcompellingly demonstrates the significance of competing e and stylistically very distinct e text-books by quantum chemists Michael Dewar and Charles Coulson in theory change in quantumchemistry.

As all three chapters in Part Three demonstrate, textbooks are crucial, yet interestingly contest-able elements in the propagation of scientific knowledge and ideology. Yet they interact with dif-ferent generations of students in different ways. Finally, therefore, Part Four considers thesignificance of ‘generational reproduction’ in the sciences. Bringing together many of the themesrunning through the volume, Kathryn Olesko establishes the importance of German physicistFriedrich Kohlrausch’s manual of Practical Physics in establishing a canon of experimental phys-ics teaching that endured from the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth. Orig-inally written for a very specific audience, its many editions became a national and then aninternational pedagogical tool. Wrapping up the section, Sharon Traweek explores mechanismsof intellectual formation and generational reproduction of high energy physicists in Japan ea pressing issue for the high energy physics community itself, with Japan centrally involved inplans for a Global Linear Collider at a time when physics itself seems to be in decline relativeto computing and the biological sciences.

In a thoughtful concluding chapter on ‘Kuhn, Foucault, and the Power of Pedagogy,’ DavidKaiser and Andrew Warwick critically compare the two theorists’ analyses of pedagogy and dis-cuss the broader implications of an epistemology of science focused around educational concerns.Pointing to the constitutive role of pedagogy both in legitimating and disseminating scientificknowledge and practices and in the dynamics of scientific and technical change, they call formore comparative studies in ‘pedagogical geography’ (p. 405) to illuminate ‘those technical skillsand sensibilities which, although normally tacit, lie at the very heart of different forms of scientificknowledge’ (p. 406). More studies of pedagogy in both the sciences and the humanities would cer-tainly be welcome: and the issues raised by this valuable collection will provide fruitful researchquestions for all historians of knowledge-making practices.

Jeff HughesUniversity of Manchester, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.10.013